Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back

Ever since the last presidential election—or really, for the past decade—I’ve constantly wondered how Donald Trump could have won the support of so many people. What is he doing “right” to attract people to him? What are Democrats doings wrong? (And as a progressive voter myself, I can openly admit the many ways I wish Democrats would do better.) This led me to Joan C. Williams‘s most recent book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back. She posits and explains the many ways working class people are so often ignored or misunderstood by the left, why this hasn’t always been the case, and how Democrats today can better appeal to this vital faction of the United States population.

What I Liked:

Looking at working class people with respect and understanding. Democrats today are largely aligned with people who are “elite,” either by education status, income, or both. Republicans have increasingly appealed to poorer voters. Why is this? I appreciated how Outclassed looks at the many economic concerns working class people contend with. If Democrats want to earn their support again, they must learn to speak to those issues and actually enact change to improve their lives. I grew up poor; my parents never finished college, and we were always paycheck-to-paycheck. I earned a master’s degree, but I still owe tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. While I’m firmly on the left (progressive, through and through!), I have found that the concerns most urgent to me are often economic issues. I fully understand working class voters in that regard, and I agree: Democrats must do better on economic issues that impact the middle and lower classes.
Constructive criticism of political messaging. The author clearly demonstrates how Republicans have learned to talk like the working class and speak to their concerns, even if their policies consistently fail to help. Democrats, in contrast, too often don’t come off as relatable or as people who truly care about the working class. I love how this book offers step-by-step tools on how to change our communication and messaging to better speak to the voters that Democrats do actually want to help.
Intersectionality. The author has spent her career lifting up LGBTQIA+ and people of color; social policies and intersectionality absolutely matter to her, which I fully agree with. However, she points out that Democrats need to learn when and how to bring intersectionality into political discourse… and that economic class is actually a part of intersectionality. She also explains why views that we often interpret as racist or homophobic frequently aren’t; they’re a part of larger class views not specific to race or sexuality. I thought this was interesting and very informative.
Go big or go home. One of my favorite points here is that Democrats 100% need to stop trying to shift further right, or appear centrist and “palatable,” in order to win back voters. No! What works is going further left, being bold about our positions, and fixing messaging, not content. This book offers a case study on how wider support for LGBTQIA+ rights was won, not the way the left may have wanted initially, but in a way that was ultimately effective. Or look at how Portugal managed the Covid outbreak in 2020. Democrats can learn how to lean into certain things that work for the working class (like displays of masculinity), while still standing firm on what matters.
Takeaways at the end of each chapter. This book packs in a ton of data and examples, spanning different disciplines. The chapters are well constructed, but I also appreciated the lists of main points that end each section. It makes it easy to recall what is most imperative as Democrats work towards winning back working class voters.

What Didn’t Work for Me:

I don’t think this is the whole picture. I appreciate everything Outclassed details so well, but I have to admit, this doesn’t absolve Trump voters in my opinion. This book explains decades of political shifts, but there’s a lot about Trump and MAGA that is too corrupt to be explained by class issues.

Audiobook:

Kirsten Potter does an excellent job of not only delivering all of the information in Outclassed, but also capturing the author’s wit and humor. The audiobook was easy to listen to and understand. I do think I’d need to revisit this in ebook or print to retain all the numbers (percentage changes, which makes up much of the data presented here). Even so, this audiobook was done very well.

Final Thoughts

Outclassed is an invaluable resource, especially in the current political climate in the U.S. and with midterms fast approaching. Joan C. Williams captures the heart of what matters to the working class and how Democrats need to improve messaging—and fast. I hope our politicians will take this book to heart; progressives generally get it, and the rest of the Democrats need to catch up, too.

Special thanks to St. Martin’s Press, Macmillan Audio, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book!

Get the Book

You can buy Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back here – it’s available as a hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back by Joan C. Williams
Audiobook Narrator	Kirsten Potter
Audience	Adult
Genre	Nonfiction: Politics and Social Issues
Number of Pages	368
Format I Read	Audiobook & Ebook (NetGalley ARCs)
Original Publication Date	May 20, 2025
Publisher	St. Martin’s Press

Official Summary

Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award 2025, Long list

An eye-opening, urgent call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races that is driving politics to the far right in the US.

Is there a single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic? Yes: changing the class dynamics driving American politics.

The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. In Outclassed, Joan C. Williams explains how to reverse that process by bridging the “diploma divide”, while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege. With illuminating stories —from the Portuguese admiral who led that country’s COVID response to the lawyer who led the ACLU’s gay marriage response (and more)— Williams demonstrates how working-class values reflect working-class lives. Then she explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions disadvantaging the working-class. Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy or a politician or social justice warrior in need of messaging advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge a multi-racial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goals.

About the Author

Credit: Olena Jacenko

Described as “legendary” by The New Yorker and as having “something approaching rock star status” by The New York Times Magazine, Joan C. Williams is an award-winning scholar of social inequality. She is the author of White Working Class, and has published on class dynamics in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic and more. She is Distinguished Professor of Law and Hastings Foundation Chair (emerita) at University of California College of the Law San Francisco.